I’ve posted about my rsync experiences in the past.  And results of a prerelease of rsync 3. Anyway I’ve been doing some testing with the final release versions of rsync 3.

It does a good job.  With a couple of patches, it will even preserve file flags and creation times to pass every backup bouncer metadata test.

Unfortunately it is slow compared to the old rsyncx.  A job that took 1.5 hours with rsyncx takes about 6 hours with rsync 3 with extended attribute support turned on.   But that time is for syncing a couple terabytes of data, so if you aren’t comparing that much data, the performance hit won’t be as dramatic.

For a backup that passes the backup bouncer tests, we’ll have to deal with the speed trade off.  Plus rsync 3 is being actively updated and is already much more stable than any previous version of rsync for Mac OS X.

Bombich has already integrated it into Carbon Copy Cloner, and he has a nice updated guide for compiling it with the required patches.